Hamlet’s Delay:

Hamlet’s delay has been an issue of endless controversy. Hamlet’s soliloquies lend first true insight his contemplative nature and illustrate the problem of his procrastination. John Holloway says:

“Hamlet’s soliloquies are foremost in bringing the idea of his delay to our notice.”

Throughout reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is an underlying question at hand that has plagued the minds of many scholars that what took Hamlet so long to carry out the orders of his noble father who contacted him beyond the grave.

Regarding this question a number of theories have been advanced. Of course there are the critics like T.S.Eliot which refuse to take any notice of it. According to them it is certainly an artistic flaw. If Hamlet would have killed Claudius the play would have ended somewhere in Act-II. So Shakespeare was forced to delay the revenge. Still there are some other critics that argue that there was no delay at all on Hamlet’s part and everything that he does is deliberate and calculated. These are of course the extreme views. Shakespeare makes it clear to us that Hamlet does delay and he is acutely aware of it.

The question of Hamlet’s delay has haunted the critics for about four centuries. Whereas the critics like Werder and Campbell have held Hamlet’s external circumstances responsible for his delay the majority of Shakespearean scholarship including Goethe, Schlegal, Coleridge and Bradley hold Hamlet himself responsible for his delay.

In Act-I the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to him and reveals the secret of his vile murder. It further imposes upon him the duty of avenging his “foul and the most unnatural murder.” The ghost’s injunctions are very clear:

“Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/A couch for luxury and damned incest”.

Hamlet’s mind is assailed with doubt whether or not this apparition is a demon sent from hell, or if it is truly his father’s spirit which has come from purgatory, to divulge the horrors of his murder, in the hope of revenge:   “The spirit that I have seen/ May be the devil and the devil hath power/To assume a pleasing shape.”

 

To verify the truth of the ghost’s statement, Hamlet first feigns madness, and then gets enacted mousetrap play to “catch the conscience of the king”. After the Players’ scene Claudius’ guilt is confirmed but Hamlet finds him at prayer, confessing his sins:

“O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven/It hath primal eldest curse upon it/A brother’s murder.”

It is golden opportunity for Hamlet to accomplish the revenge. He pulls out his rapier but his scholarly nature intervenes and he starts contemplating:

“Now might I do it pat now he is praying/And now I’ll do it and so he goes to heaven/I so am I revenged!”

Many critics including Goethe have criticized Hamlet for delaying the revenge at this point. Goethe argued that the ghost’s injunctions comprised an unquestionable imperative to action:“A voice from another world commissioned it would appear, by heaven demands vengeance for monstrous enormity.” Goethe further proposed what is called the sentimental view of Hamlet that Shakespeare meant in Hamlet to “represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for performance of it.” In other words, “A lovely, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms hero, sinks beneath a burden which he cannot bear and must not cast away.” 

Goethe suggests that “Hamlet is called upon to do what is impossible, not impossible in itself but impossible to him. And as he turns and winds and torments himself still advancing and retreating, ever reminded and remembering his purpose; he almost loses sight of it completely without recovering his happiness.”

Goethe’s Hamlet is weighed down to inaction due to the sensitive soul of a poet as he reveals his disgust in the rhymed couplet: “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite/That I was born to set it right.”

According to Goethe the key to the entire Hamlet’s problem could be found in these lines. Hamlet the soldier son of a warlike father scoffs himself for his delay in wreaking vengeance: “I, the son of a dear father murdered/Prompted to my revenge heaven and hell/Must like a whore unpack my heart with words.”

Goethe’s sentimental picture of Hamlet as “a graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of anything gross and earthly”, is outdated and certainly not fit for a hero of Hamlet’s stature.

In 19^th century Schlegal and Coleridge proposed that Hamlet is rendered incapable of action because of his tendency to philosophize too much. Taking the cue from his own words, they proposed that Hamlet’s “native hue of resolution /Is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.” According to Coleridge Hamlet had “great enormous intellectual activity and a consequent proportionate aversion to real action.” Hamlet’s excessive reflectiveness inhibits his action and he “loses himself in labyrinth of thought.”

The conscience theory of Ulrici suggests that Hamlet is incapable of wreaking vengeance because of his scrupulous nature as supported by Hamlet’s own statement, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” But the conscience theory was effectively refuted by Bradely.

In the start of 20^th century A.C.Bradley in his famous “Shakespearean Tragedy” suggested that Hamlet was unable to accomplish the revenge because of his melancholic state of mind, which was sparked by the exceptional strain that faced him with the sudden death of his father and hasty remarriage of his mother. When the ghost gives him charge to set the disjointed times he is already deep in his melancholy and therefore cannot respond with normal vigour. For Bradley this “disgust at life which varies in intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into weary apathy” explains the problem of Hamlet’s delay.

Summing up, the issue of Hamlet’s delay has provided critics with the food of conjecture and everyone has given his own interpretation of this problem.

Hamlet as a Revenge Tragedy:

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is complex and multifaceted play bringing together many themes. It is evident that in writing Hamlet, Shakespeare, to some extent, adopted the dramatic conventions of revenge tragedy. Revenge proved to be popular theme for Elizabethan dramatists and the audience. Although it was a wild justice, Elizabethan audience considered vengeance to be a pious duty laid upon the next of kin. The old law claimed an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; vengeance demanded both the eyes, a jaw full of teeth, and above all the victim should go direct to hell there to live in everlasting torment. A perfect revenge therefore needed great artistry.    

Hamlet is a play that very closely follows the dramatic conventions of revenge tragedy. All revenge tragedies originally stemmed from the Greeks, who wrote and performed the first plays. After the Greeks came Seneca who was particularly influential to all Elizabethan playwrights  including William Shakespeare. The two most famous English revenge tragedies written in the Elizabethan era were Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare and The Spanish Tragedy, written by Thomas Kyd. These two plays used almost all of the conventions for revenge tragedies in one way or the other. Hamlet especially incorporated all revenge conventions which truly made Hamlet a typical revenge play.

During Elizabethan era revenge plays were well acclaimed. Most of them were a typical revenge tragedy, a melodrama with so many turns and twists to keep the audience spell-bound. “Hamlet” as well as “The Spanish Tragedy” tackled almost all those areas that were essential for the consummation of a great revenge tragedy.

Shakespeare in Hamlet employs the framework of Senecan Tragedy to convey the revenge theme. But underneath the outer framework of Senecan Revenge Tragedy, lie key Shakespearean themes of human condition, social  indoctrination,  the morality of the ghost’s injunction, and the ethics of revenge.

The opening scene sets the tone of the play – a play shrouded in mystery and horror. The ghost appears to the night guards, a shadowy figure resembling much in the dress and the armour of the late king. The appearance of dead king’s ghost has a profound effect upon the night guards as Marcellus remarks: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Although Horatio will not believe in the ghost until witness of his eyes; it appearance “harrows him with fear and wonder”. It is not made to speak rather “stalks away majestically”. The ghost appears twice in the opening scene but does not vouchsafe a reply to Horatio’s questions. Hamlet is amazed at the idea of his father’s apparition:

“My father’s spirit in arms! All is not well/ I doubt some foul play.”

Hamlet himself is dumbfounded at the sight the ghost. The ghost makes the shocking revelation of its murder to Hamlet. It further enjoins on Hamlet the sacred duty of avenging his “foul and the most un-natural murder”. The ghost’s injunctions are very clear:

“Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/A couch for luxury and damned incest”.

The awful revelation of the ghost forms the soul of the tragedy and drives the entire action.

Verity points out:

“Without the ghost’s initial revelation of truth to Hamlet, there would be no occasion for revenge; in other words no tragedy of Hamlet.”

Hamlet’s mind is assailed with doubt whether or not this apparition is a demon sent from hell, or if it is truly his father’s spirit which has come from purgatory, to divulge the horrors of his murder, in the hope of revenge:   

“The spirit that I have seen/ May be the devil and the devil hath power/To assume a pleasing shape.”

To verify the truth of the ghost’s statement, Hamlet first feigns madness, and then gets enacted mousetrap play to “catch the conscience of the king”. During the play Hamlet closely watches Claudius’ reaction when the actors perform the murder scene. Hamlet's plan works and his uncle in a fit of discomfort runs out the room, where Hamlet goes after him. Now, Hamlet knows that Claudius is guilty.

Afterwards Hamlet finds Claudius at prayer, confessing his sins:“O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven/It hath primal eldest curse upon it/A brother’s murder.”

He pulls out his sword and gets ready to kill Claudius. But suddenly Hamlet changes his mind because if he kills his uncle while he is praying he will go to heaven, and Hamlet wants him to go to hell. So Hamlet postpones the execution of his uncle at this point in the play.

The next confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius does not happen till the end of the book. Claudius hatches a plan according to which Hamlet and Laertes will have a mock sword fight, but Laertes will be using a real poisoned sword. Laertes stabs him with the poisoned sword then Hamlet takes hold of the poisoned sword, and stabs Laertes with it. Meanwhile Queen Gertrude dies from the poisoned drink intended for Hamlet. As Laertes lays down dying he reveals to Hamlet that his uncle King Claudius was behind it all. Hamlet then in a fit of rage runs his uncle through with the poisoned sword. Hamlet has now finally revenged his father but too late and at the cost of so many lives.

Hamlet fulfills all the conventions of typical revenge tragedy: there is murder, adultery, insanity, incestuous marriage and faithfulness. Besides these, there is a melodramatic element also – violence and bloodshed, terrible and blood-chilling scenes – which is in line with the revenge tragedy conventions.

Hamlet is not a simple revenge tragedy. Shakespeare has woven complex threads of the contrasting characters. Shakespeare has introduced characters like  Laertes and Fortinbras that are  obviously foils to Hamlet. Fortinbras, the son of the slain king of Norway, is all hot for action. He finds “quarrel in a straw” and intends to risk his life even for an “egg-shell”. He travels many miles to take his revenge and ultimately succeeds in conquering Denmark. When Hamlet murders Polonius, another revenge is ready to begin. Laertes is a typical revenger who is capable of direct and headstrong revenge even at the cost of damnation.

“To hell, allegiance! Vows to the blackest devil.” , he declares.

If Hamlet feels “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”, Laertes consigns conscience to the devil, and will “cut his throat in the church”. Hamlet, on the other hand,  has to convert the external action of revenge into one that is internal, free and truly moral.

Summing up, to say Hamlet merely a revenge tragedy would be to do a great injustice. It would ignore play’s artistic superiority over other plays of this genre. It is only befitting that its hero falls to the beautiful heavenly benediction of Horatio: “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Supernaturalism in Hamlet:

Ghost or supernatural plays an important role in Shakespearean tragedies. Shakespeare has introduced ghosts and witches which have supernatural knowledge. According to Moulton; 

“Supernatural agency has a place in the world of Shakespeare”.
In Hamlet, the supernatural appears in the form of the ghost. The first act is the little play in itself, and the ghost is the hero of it; 550 out of the 850 lines are concerned with it. Dover Wilson says:

“ The ghost is the linchpin of Hamlet, remove it, and the whole play falls to pieces.”

 The ghost in Hamlet has at least a three-fold dramatic significance; It contributes to the general tragic utterances of the play; it motives the entire action of the play; it shows up the character and drives home a certain moral effect.

First, in the play, Shakespeare has introduced the supernatural element in order to create an atmosphere of mystery, horror and suspense. It diffuses an atmosphere of awe through which the tragedy becomes more impressive. We come across the ghost that chills our blood with horror. It is not made to speak rather “stalks away majestically”. Horatio does not believe in the ghost but its appearance “harrows him with fear and wonder”. The introduction of the late king’s ghost in the first scene creates an awe-inspiring atmosphere which is the forewarning that unnatural deeds are either to take place, or to be disclosed. Hamlet himself exclaims with wonder:
“My father’s spirit in arms! All is not well/I doubt some foul play”,

Secondly, the ghost motives the entire action of the play. The ghost makes the shocking revelation of its murder to Hamlet:

“The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/Now wears his crown.”
The ghost unfolds the secret that Hamlet’s uncle Claudius has killed the king to usurp his throne and seduce his queen. It further imposes upon Hamlet the entrusted task of avenging his father’s murder:

 “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/A couch for luxury and damned incest”.
The awful revelation of the ghost forms the soul of the tragedy and springs the action. What the ghost reveals totally staggers Hamlet.

Verity points out:

“Without the ghost’s initial revelation of truth to Hamlet, there would be no occasion for revenge; in other words no tragedy of Hamlet.”

Thirdly, the presence of ghost in “Hamlet” has a moral significance also. The play shows that we cannot conceal the truth for a long time. It must appear and “Murder speaks with most miraculous organ”. The ghost, we feel, is a representative of that hidden and ultimate power rules in the universe, it is a messenger of the divine justice. Hamlet says:
“Foul deeds will rise/Though all earth overwhelm them, to men’s eye”.
Hamlet’s mind is assailed with doubt whether or not this apparition is a demon sent from hell, or if it is truly his father’s spirit which has come from purgatory, to divulge the horrors of his murder, in the hope of revenge:    

“The spirit that I have seen/ May be the devil and the devil hath power/To assume a pleasing shape.”

To verify the truth of the ghost’s statement, Hamlet first feigns madness, and then gets enacted mousetrap to “catch the conscience of the king”. But after Hamlet has tricked the king into a show of remorse, he would “take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound”.

About the nature of the ghost, there exist a controversy; some critics are of the view that the ghost is a subjective phenomenon – a hallucination springing from imagination. Other believe that it is an objective phenomenon.

In the Queen’s closet scene, the ghost is invisible to  the queen who interprets Hamlet’s action as the fantasy of his mind. But Hamlet not only sees the ghost but also interacts with it.  

The second appearance of the ghost in the play is very significant. Dr. Greg puts forward the hallucination theory in this regard . He suggests that the ghost in Hamlet is nothing but a freakish fancy of Hamlet’s imagination. The ghost indeed is the manifestation of externalized spectre of the psychic disturbance of Hamlet.

It must be kept in mind that Shakespeare’s characters Hamlet, Macbeth and Brutus are gifted with imagination and highly susceptible to the phenomenon of supernatural. Banquo’s ghost in the royal banquet may be the hallucination of Macbeth and Caesar’s ghost might be Brutus’ imagination. But here in Hamlet the presence of the ghost is felt not only by Hamlet but also by Horatio and night watchmen. Hence the ghost must be objective phenomenon. Then why not the ghost has been notified by the queen? It is interpreted that the queen is  unable spiritual visions of the ghost as she stands far from the path of honour.

To reconcile this subjective, objective controversy; one has to restore to Dower Wilson who delves deeper into the problem and concludes:

“The ghost scenes in Hamlet cannot rightly be understood without some study of Elizabethan spiritualism which was very difficult thing from modern the spiritualism.” Elizabethan audience believed in  ghosts, witches, portents, omens and their harmful effects. The introduction of the ghosts and witches was a revolutionary innovation in Elizabethan drama.

To sum up, the presentation of the ghost in Hamlet is an artistic triumph. Without it there would have been no tragic suspense or curiosity, no suitable atmosphere and consequently no interest.

Catherine Barkley: Character Analysis

Ernest Hemingway, one the greatest novelists of modern times, created such gems of English literature and produced such unforgettable and marvelous characters as can never be forsaken or overlooked. In A Farewell to Arms, there are two important and extraordinary characters; one of them, undoubtedly, is Catherine Barkley.

It seems to be worthwhile to mention that she is a flat character and she has pre-conceived notions about life, death, love and war. She is confident and excites sympathy and tender feelings by her gentle and exemplary behavior. She is beautiful and tall woman and has a comely figure.

When Catherine sees Henry for the first time, the shadow of death hangs over their meeting--her fiancé has been blown “all to bits” in the war of Somme. In her conversation with Henry, she laments that she didn’t marry her fiancé before he died. She says that they were engaged for "eight years," and that they "grew up together."

Upon her meeting with Henry, Catherine relies upon the grand illusion of love and seduction for comfort. Catherine seeks solace for the death of her fiancé while Henry is doing anything to distance himself from the war. Catherine reminds Henry several times that their courtship is a game. But even at the stage of flirtation and mere sensuality, we may easily perceive that Catherine’s love is deeper than that of Henry.

Catherine is extremely romantic, she loves being in love. She’s also desperately lonely when she meets him. Thus she merges her own identity into Henry’s. What she really craves for, is to be "one" with him:

 "There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me."

 Catherine's love is so intense that it becomes her religion: 

"You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got", she tells Henry.

She totally worships Frederic like a god and will do anything to get him. And she doesn’t fall apart without him when they are separated, but just keeps on trucking and hoping. She doesn’t need Frederic for anything but love. She says to Henry that they are married to each other and must not bother about formal marriage.  On her pregnancy she assures Henry as:

 "I’ll try and not make trouble for you. I know I’ve made trouble now. But haven’t I always been a good girl until now?"

She is not worried at all about the illegitimate child being nourished in her womb. Rather she worries about Henry becoming bored with her, and repeatedly talks about changing her hairstyle to maintain his interest; she worries about gaining weight from the pregnancy and even apologizes to Henry for being in pain during her difficult labour.

Significantly, one cannot doubt Catherine's bravery and stoicism as she perishes; in stoicism and bravery, she matches if not exceeds Henry. She handles with grace their midnight flight from Italy, never succumbing to fear or even irritability. Even at the beginning of the novel, when Henry is tempted to dismiss her as “a little crazy”, Catherine is fully aware of the game which they are playing. “You don’t have to pretend to love me… You see I’m not mad.”

She has an admirable personal strength and firmness of conviction which carries her through each challenging situation with fortitude. She even handles her own death with courage, rejecting the presence of a priest and asking simply that Henry stay with her.

Hemingway ingeniously introduces the symbolic significance of the rain into the narrative. Rain is important to the novel, and especially to Catherine.  The rain almost always heralds destruction and death; it impinges upon whatever momentary happiness Henry and Catherine have and turns it into muddy misery.Catherine is very fearful of the rain and expresses her inner fear in these words:

"I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it" 

She’s afraid that the rain is a portent of the death of any love she might find.

In the 1970s and 80s, feminist critic Fetterly argued that the character of Catherine in A Farewell to Arms proves that Ernest Hemingway was a misogynist i.e he was against women. Fetterly's claim is that Catherine’s death at the end of the novel proves that Hemingway thought that "the only good woman is a dead woman."
Later female critics, most notably, Spanier, however, argued the opposite – that Catherine helps prove that Hemingway loved women and understood them deeply. Spanier argues that Catherine is the protagonist of the novel and that her willingness to love Frederic entirely is heroic.

Even Catherine’s death during childbirth is meant to parallel the deaths of the soldiers in battle. Like the soldiers who stood brave in the face of battle, Catherine stood brave in the face of a battle with her own body.

In a nut-shell, Hemingway, through the character of Catherine Barkley, introduces us to an outstanding and extraordinary brave woman. She possesses positive attitude and faces difficulties of life with a smiling face. She brings about revolutionary changes in his character. Thus  Hemingway uses Catherine as a foil to Henry and an index of his maturation. She is a loving, dedicated woman whose desire and capacity for a redemptive, otherworldly love makes her the inevitable victim of the tragedy.

Theme of Love and Marriage in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular novels of Jane Austen due to its multi-dimensional versatility of themes. Andrew H. Wright remarks: “ She (Jane Austen) develops themes of the broadest significance, the novels go beyond social record, beneath the didactic, to moral concern, perplexity and commitment”

One of the most important themes of Pride and Prejudice,  love and marriage, is also the central theme of the novel. The oft-quoted opening sentence of the novel demonstrates this basic theme: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”

It is true that the chief preoccupation of Jane Austen’s heroines is getting married and life is a matrimonial ceremony for them. Pride and Prejudice dramatizes the economic inequality of women, showing how women had to marry undesirable mates in order to gain some financial security. Marriage was a significant social concern in Jane Austen’s time and she was fully conscious of the disadvantages of being single as she wrote to her niece Fanny Knight, “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor….which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony”.

Through five marriages, Jane Austen defines good and bad reasons for marriage. Charlotte – Collins, Lydia – Wickham, Jane – Bingley and Elizabeth – Darcy are the four newly-weds. The old marriage is that of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet.

The marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet is the worst example of its kind in the novel. They are pole apart in their thoughts and temperaments. Their marriage is shown to be a disaster, with the wife playing the part of a fool and the husband retreating to live an uninvolved life.  Jane Austin says about this marriage:
" Her (Elizabeth’s) father captivated by youth and beauty … had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her “. Their marriage lacks "emotional compatibility and intellectual understanding". The Bennet’s marriage ends in mutual forbearance.

Charlotte and Collins are the first newly-weds. Charlotte agrees to marry Collins solely for her financial security. It is relatively her advancing age that hastens her engagement. Charlotte tries to justify her position by giving argumentative reasons to Elizabeth: “I am not romantic you know, I never was, I ask only a comfortable home”. Thus, to Charlotte, marriage is an economic transaction undertaken in self-interest.

The runaway marriage of Lydia-Wickham is based on mere superficial qualities as sex, appearance, good looks and youthful flirtation. The passion between the unprincipled rake, Wickham and the flighty Lydia is bound to cool, and in their unhappy conjugal life, mutual toleration is the nearest approach that can be expected.

The marriage between Jane and Bingley is a successful marriage of its kind. Jane Austen expresses her opinion about this marriage through the words of Elizabeth:
"All his (Bingley) expectations of felicity, to be rationally founded, because they had for basis the excellent understanding, and super excellent disposition of Jane, and a general similarity of feeling and taste between them."
However, unlike Darcy and Elizabeth, there is no planning in their relationships. Both the characters are too gullible and too good-hearted to ever act strongly against external forces that may attempt to separate them. So, their marriage is in between success and failure.

The fifth and final example of marriage is that of Elizabeth and Darcy. It is a kind of an ideal marriage based on the true understanding and cross examinations. According to Jane Austen , the courtship of Darcy and Elizabeth is a perfect union which sums up the purpose of her novel. Although it begins with the pride and prejudice; it passes through many stages as "it converts from full hatred to complete admiration and satisfaction" . For Darcy, Elizabeth is no longer the woman who is "not handsome enough to tempt (him)", as he admits that “… it is many months since I have considered [Elizabeth] as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.”. Also for Elizabeth , he is no longer "the last man in the world whom (she) could ever be prevailed on to marry" but he becomes the "man who in disposition and talents , would most suit her" .

Thus the theme of love and marriage is very aptly exemplified in Pride and Prejudice. Beginning with the arrival of Bingley and Darcy, both single men “in possession of a good fortune”, the novel traces the courtship of Jane-Bingley and Elizabeth-Darcy through various misunderstandings and hindrances, before they are happily married to each other. We can sum up above discussion in the words of Elizabeth:

 “There can be no doubt that it is settled between us already that we are to be the happiest couple in the world.”

Jane Austen’s Limited Range:

Jane Austen as a novelist has stringently set her limits which she seldom oversteps. She was amazingly aware of which side her genius lay and she exploited it accordingly without any false notions of her capabilities or limitations. As Lord David Cecil points out, she very wisely stayed "within the range of her imaginative inspiration." Her imaginative inspiration was as severely limited as, for example, Hardy's or Arnold Bennett's. Her themes, her characters, her background setting -everything has a well-etched range within which she works, and works exquisitely. Jane Austen herself referred to her work as “Two inches of ivory.” In a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, Jane Austen wrote, “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.”

Although she works on a very small canvas, yet she has widened the scope of fiction in almost all its directions. Her stories are mostly indoor actions where only family matters are discussed. However, her plots are perfect and characterization is superb.

Critics have labeled her novels belonging to a narrow range of themes and characterization. Even in her limited world, Austen restricts herself to the depiction of a particular class of country gentry. She excludes the matters of lower class and hardly touches aristocracy. For instance, she has discussed Lady Catherine only for the purpose of satire. The same sort of story is repeated, subject matters are very much the same in all her novels, confined to the landed gentry – Servants, laborers and yeomanry rarely appear in her novels. Her nephew James Austen-Leigh, alludes to her limited range: “She was always careful not to meddle with matters with which she did not thoroughly underst. There is no terrible happening in Jane Austin’s novels. Everything happens in a civilized manner. The extreme severity in “Pride and Prejudice” is elopement of Lydia with Wickham.

Charlotte Bronte was constrained to observe about Jane Austen:

"She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her : she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood."

Charlotte Bronte believes that Jane Austen is not concerned with the deep morals and she is an author of the surface only: “Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eye, mouth, hands and feet.”

Andrew H. Wright points out that there is very little religion discussed in her novels, politics is not mentioned too. There are no adventures found in her books, no abstract ideas and no discussion of spiritual or metaphysical issues.

Macaulay declares that her characters are commonplace, “yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.”

Sir Walter Scott appreciates the precision of her Art and its merit:“That young lady has a talent for describing the involvement of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with.”

G.H. Lewes pays glowing tribute to her:“First and foremost, let Jane Austen be named, the greatest artist that has ever written... Her circle may be restricted, but it is complete. Her world is a perfect orb, and vital sphere.”

Pride and Prejudice like her other novels has a narrow physical setting in which she lived. The story revolves around Netherfield, Longbourn, Hunsford, Meryton and Pemberley. It seems to be an irony of the history that when the Romantic Poets were discovering the beauties of nature, Jane Austen confined her characters within the four walls of the drawing room. Her heroines also famously never leave the family. Edward Fitzgerald states: “She never goes out of the Parlour.”

Jane Austen’s limitations stemmed from the choice of her themes: love, marriage and courtship. All of her six novels deal with same theme of love and marriage. There are pretty girls waiting for eligible bachelors to be married to.

 Another limitation is the feminization of her novels. Men do not appear except in the company of women. All the information about Darcy is proved through Elizabeth’s point of view. Hence, the reader looks at Darcy through Elizabeth’s eye

However her novels are profound in the psychological delineation of her characters. She is able to capture superbly, the subtlety of thoughts and reflexes of her characters. We can sum up above discussion in the words of Virginia Woolf: “Jane Austen is the mistress of a much deeper emotion than appears on the surface.”

EUSTACIA’s TRAGEDY

Hardy’s “femme fatale”, Eustacia Vye is perhaps one of the most alluring and fascinating characters in The Return of the Native. Hardy presents a complicated and enthralling character of Eustacia vye, a genuine woman as opposed to an idealised one. Although Hardy gives proud, selfish and egotistical potrait of Eustacia, yet he masterfully creates a scenario in which she appears a tragic figure. Whereas  Clym may be ‘the nicest’ among Hardy’s characters, it is the eccentric Eustacia Vye which is the centre  of the novel. Even in the Hardy’s introduction of her, there is plenty to dwell upon. 

The first time her existence  is mentioned, it is through the idle gossip of the locals. She is described as “very strange in her ways”, some of them accuse her of being a witch. Unlike Clym, whom the heath folk can at least fathom in part, Eustacia is beyond their comprehension. Her whole personality has a sleepy, dreamy cast to it. Though she is beautiful in an exotic way, it is clear that she is not an easy person to live with or be around. Hardy takes great pains to describe Eustacia in supernatural terms, as when he describes her ‘the raw material of a divinity’ or as the “Queen of Night” “whose eyes are pagan, are too fancy that a whole winter does not contain darkness enough to form its shadow’ or when is described as profiled against the sky, due to her stature "like an organic part of the entire motionless structure,". She is a woman of nineteen, tall, straight and graceful. Her very appearance made Clym infatuated with her.

A Part of Eustacia’s tragedy lies in her own impulsive nature. Eustacia always longs for passionate love: ”To be  loved to madness” is her great desire. The crippling boredom and feeling of being trapped within the heath leads Eustacia to crave an unrealistic love, as “love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days”. Hardy states that “she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover”. Hardy goes on to say that these passions are those that make her “a model goddess”, but not quite “a model woman.".

Eustacia, to some extent, is responsible for her tragedy as she always vicillates between her love for Clym and her love for Wildeve. Eustacia’s ability to quickly forget her love for Wildeve as soon as an apparently superior possible opportunity presents itself is very telling. Once she begins fixating on Clym Yeobright, Wildeve develops ‘the rayless outline of the sun through smoked glass.’ All Eustacia ever really craves is a chance to escape the Heath and lead the life she so arrogantly presumes to be her right.

Throughout the novel Eustacia is filled with romantic imagining of a man who would “love her to madness” and take her away from the heath. She falls in love with Clym as soon as she learns Clym’s arrival. She imagines Clym as a born leader of man who would go with her into the brilliant world – Paris which would  give her the fullness of life and the freedom she craves for. Even When Clym proses Eustacia, Eustacia’s response is, “At present speak of Paris to me. Is there any place like it on earth?”

Eustacia’s tragedy can also be understood by the incongruency of Clym-Eustacia relationship and a comparative study of their contrastive natures. The former is a plodding idealist, whereas the later is a fiery sensualist. Where Eustacia’s vision is a projective dream of the world, Clym’s is an introspective dream. Whereas Clym is ‘inwoven with the heath’, Eustacia is a complete alien on the heath, making her entrapment upon it even more poignant. Her belief that she will be able to convince Clym to return to Paris after they are married is another part of her downfall; she has too much faith in her own power. Within two months of their marriage, Eustacia’s vision of Clym is changed utterly; he is a fallen idol far from being the Promethean lover,; he is ‘merely’ a furze-cutter, and seeing him as such she feels degraded.

Eustacia Vye’s relationship with Egdon Heath is crucial to a full understanding of both her as a character and her place within the novel.  Eustacia’s fiery nature stands in direct contrast with the bleakness of the heath (or at least, the bleakness which she herself perceives). Eustacia detests the heath, and her words later ring eerily true when she says of the heath that “’tis my cross, my shame, and will be my death!”.  She is fatally out-of-place and she doesn't quite fit into her surroundings.  and it helps to form quite an interesting interpretation of Eustacia as a ‘fish out of water’, so to speak. Somehow, it is impossible to shake off the feeling that Eustacia’s fate had been sealed always; she was doomed to exist and die on Egdon Heath, as she herself predicted. Right at the end of the novel, Damon tells Eustacia “I see more and more that I have been your ruin,” to which Eustacia replies “Not you. This place I live in.” Vocal in her condemnation of Destiny, Eustacia is an active demonstration of Hardy's theme in the novel. In the end audience finds her resenting over her fortune:“How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me. I do not deserve my lot…I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control.”

Clym- Eustacia Relationship

Hardy’s The Return of the Native is a novel based on unpractical idealism and  incompatible relationship between two major characters – Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye. Both of them are poles apart in character: The former is a plodding idealist, whereas the later is a fiery sensualist. Where Eustacia’s vision is a projective dream of the world, Clym’s is an introspective dream.

Where she is a ‘the raw material of a divinity’ who wilfully creates the objects of her world, Clym, is the enslaved sovereign of the kingdom of his mind. The conflict between these two antithetical modes of perception is inevitable from the outset; both fail to see the other at the commencement of the relationship.

 When the story begins, we are not introduced with Clym who has been in Paris at that time but returns soon to the heath and it is the return that drives the plot of novel. Clym Yeobright is the tragic hero of Hardy’s novel. He is young man of thirty three and he is attractive enough to make Eustasia fall in love with him. In a letter to Arthur Hopkins, Hardy rated him as the most important character of the novel but described Eustacia as “the wayward and erring heroine”.

 Eustacia is described by Hardy, as “Queen of Night” whose eyes are pagan, are too fancy that a whole winter does not contain darkness enough to form its shadow. She is a woman of nineteen, tall, straight and graceful. Her very appearance made Clym infatuated with her.

Eustacia always longs for passionate love:”To be  loved to madness” is her great desire.The crippling boredom and feeling of being trapped within the heath leads Eustacia to crave an unrealistic love. Hardy says that ‘she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover’. Micael Millgate accuses Eustacia of “impulsive actions… which drive the couple finally apart” but describes Clym as  “Self-absorbed, isolated, humourless…incapable of sympathetic communication with anyone outside himself”. Eustacia’s ability to quickly forget her ‘love’ for Wildeve as soon as an apparently superior possible opportunity presents itself is very telling. Once she begins fixating on Clym Yeobright, Wildeve develops ‘the rayless outline of the sun through smoked glass’. All Eustacia ever really craves is a chance to escape the Heath and lead the life she so arrogantly presumes to be her right.Throughout the novel Eustacia is filled with romantic imagining of a man who would “love her to madness” and take her away from the heath. She imagines Clym as a born leader of man who would go with her into the brilliant world – Paris which would give her the fullness of life and the freedom she craves for.  Even When Clym proses Eustacia, Eustacia’s response is, “At present speak of Paris to me. Is there any place like it on earth?”

Clym Yeobright, on the other hand, is relentless and self-centered man who ‘had been so inwoven with the heath in his boyhood that hardly anybody could look upon it without thinking of him’. Indeed, it should be noted that Clym is the returning native of the heath, while Eustacia is a complete alien on the heath, making her entrapment upon it even more poignant. Her belief that she will be able to convince Clym to return to Paris after they are married is another part of her downfall; she has too much faith in her own power There is a fatal incompatibility between the two lovers. Even at the moment  when she  and Clym decide to marry, she gazes toward the eclipsed moon and warns,

“See how our time is slipping, slipping, slipping!” 

She confides to her lover the deep fear that their love will not last. All her fears come true.

Within two months of their marriage, Eustacia’s vision of Clym is changed utterly; he is a fallen idol; far from being the Promethean lover her idealising vision had made of him; he is ‘merely’ a furze-cutter, and seeing him as such she feels degraded. In addition, her  renewed interest in Wildeve further drives Eustacia away from Clym. The death of Mrs. Yeobright is a turning point in their relationship. When Clym learns the real cause of Mrs. Yeobright’s death, he becomes angrily upset and rushes home to confront Eustacia. He storms in on Eustacia. He screams at her and calls her a whore and a murderess. Eustacia exits Clym’s house in anger and despair. Eustacia, then decides to elope with Wildeve in order to fulfill her long cherished dream of Paris. On the night of her elopement, weather assumes a menacing shape, and Eustacia seems to drown herself alongwith Wildeve. Thus the most incompatible relationship Clym and Eusacia comes to an end. Eustacia met her tragic death leaving behind agonized Clym  who turns himself into a preacher in order to console her depressed soul.

Clym-Eustacia relationship can also be understood in the light of Eustacia-Wildeve relationship. She seems to be torn between her love for Clym and love for Wildeve. She oscillates back and forth  in her love affairs. The incongruency of the Clym-Eustacia relationship is also  illustrated by their different attitudes toward Egdon Heath. Clym loves Egdon Heath as much as Eustacia hates it. He is the ‘native' of the soil and very object appears to him friendly. Eustacia detests the heath, and her words later ring eerily true when she says of the heath that “’tis my cross, my shame, and will be my death!”

Egdon Heath and its Significance

One of the most prominent figures in Hardy’s The Return of the Native is not a human character, but the physical landmark- Egdon Heath. The heath's central role is obvious from the beginning. The novel opens with an extensive description of the heath at dusk. Hardy begins by saying: “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment”. Even though the main story focuses on the relationships between Eustacia Vye, Clym Yeobright, Wildeve and Thomasin, the Heath is the central figure. Many of the events occur on or around Egdon Heath, and equally as important- all of the characters have their own special relationship with the heath.It is  “A Face on which Time makes but little Impression”. The nature of human beings is fleeting and insignificance as compared to the permanence of the heath. Avrom Fleishman in "The Buried Giant of Egdon Heath" regards Egdon Heath as a figure "in both narrative senses of 'figure,' as a person and as a trope". Hardy says:

         “The heath becomes full of watchful intentness. When other things sank brooding to sleep, the Heath appeared slowly to awake and listen”

       The Return of the Native has been called “The Book of Egdon Heath”. Hardy does an award-winning job at extensively describing Egdon heath for his readers. He even brings the heath alive: “The somber stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it.” The heath proves physically and psychologically important throughout the novel: characters are defined by their relation to the heath, and the weather patterns of the heath. Indeed, it almost seems as if the characters are formed by the heath itself: Diggory Venn, red from head to toe, is an actual embodiment of the muddy earth; Eustacia Vye seems to spring directly from the Heath, a part of Rainbarrow itself, when she is first introduced; Wildeve's name might just as well refer to the wind-whipped heath itself. But, importantly, the Heath manages to defy definition. It is, in chapter one, "a place perfectly accordant with man's nature." The narrator's descriptions of the Heath vary widely throughout the novel, ranging from the sublime to the gothic.

       Hardy’s description of the Heath has “a symbolic overtone with philosophy”. “It had a lonely face suggesting tragical possibilities” It neither ghastly, not hateful, common place, tame, but it is like man slighted and enduring.  Egdon is the premier and most extended instance of Hardy’s habitual personification of Nature. Hardy himself lived on the fringes of Egdon Heath and was perfectly with this environment. In no other novel of his does background come up as lively and breathing as The Return of the Native.

 “Egdon is a protagonist of Return of the Native”, says Walter Allen. Egdon influences all the characters moving them to love or hate, to despair or to the philosophic mind and they are described in relation to their environment. When Clym moves out of his mother’s house, the fir and beech trees are described to be “suffering more demage than during the highest winds of winter … the wasting sap would bleed for many days to come”. The two most resistatant characters to the Heath are clearly Eustacia and Wildeve; their intense disgust is revealed in their conversation: “You hate the Heath as much as ever; that I know”, “I do … ‘Tis my cross, my misery, and will be my death.” It is ironic when Eustacia says that she is setting for  his fatal journey. We also get an insight to the way Eustacia is feeling through the storm when Hardy says, “Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without.” Hardy describes her as “the raw material of a divinity” whose “celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervour had proved to be somewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon.”

        Clym, unlike, Eustacia, is the product of Egdon and its shaggy hills are friendly and congenial to him. Heath swallows him up and absorbs him into its furze and other creatures. The way Hardy describes Clym when he is out on the Heath working is like something from Snow Wight, with “Amber coloured butterflies” and the“Emerald-green grasshoppers.”  If Clym is the child of heath, Eustacia is haunted by the heath, the reddleman haunts the heath. He knows every nook and corner of heath.  The heath does irreparable damage to Mrs. Yeobright and kills her. Thomasin thinks it an impersonal open ground. She calls it “a ridiculous old place.” But confesses that she could live nowhere else.

 At the very last, Egdon is shown to be inhospitable to man, as remarks D.H. Lawrence: “Egdon whose dark soil was strong and crude and organic as the body of a beast”. The dark-spirit of nature seems to be ready to engulf the whole scenario.

 

When human figures do finally appear, they seem insignificant against the backdrop of the indifferent, ruthless, Egdon Heath. Many times during the course of the story, for instance, Clym will be shown to appear like a tiny insect moving across the face of nature. These elements—the heath as a setting and a symbol, and the way the main characters are shown in relation to their surroundings—demonstrate Hardy’s theme: “Man lives his life in a universe that is at least indifferent to him and may be hostile."